By FRANKIE SACHS Arutz Sheva August 19, 2004

Jews and the Olympic Games
By Paul Yogi Mayer
Valentine Mitchell
255pp., $27.95

It’s like the punch line of a joke: Someone displays the cover of a book entitled Greatest Jewish Sport Heroes, only to reveal that the volume is just three pages long.

It is an outdated misconception; any true sports fan can quickly tick off the names of Jews who have excelled in nearly every sport: in cricket it’s one-time South African captain Ali Bacher, rugby fans note world cup hero Joel Stransky, and what American Jew doesn’t know the story of how the great Sandy Koufax refused to pitch in the World Series on Yom Kippur?

And then there were swimmer Mark Spitz’s seven gold medals at the Munich games in 1972 - a crowning achievement for any athlete, and enough to seal the Jewish people’s legitimacy as equals in the sporting world.

It is achievements like Spitz’s that one expects to see chronicled in British sports historian Paul Yogi Mayer’s book Jews and the Olympic Games. And while the German-born Mayer, a former coach and track and field athlete, does write briefly about the swimming great, he also spends nearly a third of the book detailing his own recollections of the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin.

According to Mayer, his goal in writing the book is to prove that “we Jews are neither inferior… nor superior to others.” He goes on to say that he hopes his work will “inspire the young” and “other minorities,” adding that the book, originally published in German with the title J dische Olympiasieger: Sport - Ein Sprungbrett f r Minorit ten, is not meant to be an academic dissertation.

A good thing, since his work often falls short of academic credibility.

DESPITE THE tireless work that must have gone into Jews and the Olympic Games, it clearly wasn’t painstaking enough. There are numerous inexcusable errors and muddled passages.

Mayer - who often refers to himself as a Zeitzeuge, or witness - relies on his own memories and those of his personal contacts to detail Jewish participation in various Olympic games in the first half of the last century. Without conducting thorough independent research or contacting each of the acquaintances mentioned, it is impossible to verify most of the information he supplies.

However, in the book’s chapters on more recent Olympics, I discovered mistakes and inconsistencies that cast doubt not only on his skills as a researcher, but also on his veracity.

For instance, although misspelling the name of Israel’s European Champion pole-vaulter Alex Averbukh (as Averbugh) can be forgiven, crowning him as world champion when he in fact won the bronze at the 1999 world championships cannot.

In another case of sloppiness, Mayer refers to windsurfer Gal Friedman - the Israeli bronze medalist at the 1996 Atlanta games and a medal hopeful in the men’s mistral sailing event in Athens this month - as “Gail.” I was inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt and call it a typo until he wrote “Gail sailed her boat.”

INACCURACIES CONTINUED when he wrote that “we have no names of any Jewish winter sports competitors who won medals, and one can assume that there were also no Jewish competitors” at the 1994 Lillehammer games in Norway. This “assumption” is particularly embarrassing, since Israel was actually represented for the first time in the winter games that year by skater Michael Shmerkin.

About the 1998 winter games in Nagano, Japan, he writes, “I have no further information about any participation of Jewish winter sportsmen and women.” Why didn’t he simply Google it? That’s what I did, and I easily learned that the Israeli delegation was considerably bigger that year.

Of course these blunders also cast doubt on his claims that there were no Jews at either Sarajevo ‘84 or Calgary ‘88.

Despite the glaring factual errors, Jews and the Olympic Games gives an occasionally interesting read for the Jewish sports fan.

Mayer’s choice to move in chronological order, with short chapters detailing the historical importance of each of the games since their revival in 1896 in Athens, gives readers a decent record of Olympic history from the Jewish perspective.

The strongest feature of Mayer’s work is his first-hand account of the events of the Berlin games, and his fellow athletes’ and coaches’ experiences in 1930s Germany before he escaped to England in 1939.

The book also permanently enshrines the feats of the great 20th-century Jewish athletes - an important accomplishment, despite the book’s shortcomings.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 22nd, 2004 and is filed under ourjerusalem.